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Every few decades or more often our federal tax system has a major upheaval. After I got my accounting degree in 1977 my first two jobs were working in state government auditing focused on matters internal to the function of the government. I still feel I learned a lot during those jobs but it was not a good fit for me.
In the early 1980’s I entered the world of public accounting which to a large extent is broken into two segments.
The first segment is a focus on attestation of financial statements with the level of services from the highest level downward being audit, review and compilation. The CPA firm issues an opinion on financial statements attestation work which requires practicing in a licensed CPA firm by individuals with required education that have passed appropriate exams, had appropriate experience and who continue to obtain sufficient and targeted continuing education. The primary purpose of CPA’s in the attestation function is to serve the public by allowing limited reliance on financial statements which are the responsibility of the management of the issuer of the financial statements upon which the CPA firm opines.
The second segment is a focus on tax. Tax work requires a CPA or non CPA to follow the law and rules created by federal and state governments but the work is focused on helping business and individuals meet their objectives of tax compliance, planning and minimizing both tax paid and the cost of the tax work. A CPA license is not necessary for most tax work with the main exception being representation of third parties before the governments and in some legal matters.
We are now at a point in time where the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 are set to expire Dec. 31, 2025. I think that many of the complexities created in the TCJA should be addressed as the federal tax laws and rules will change but my hope is that more complexity is not added.
The Bloomberg government reporter has a good summary of what is changing in business, international and individual taxes at the end of 2025 if nothing is done.
https://about.bgov.com/insights/elections/2025-tax-policy-crossroads-what-will-happen-when-the-tcja-expires/#which-tcja-individual-tax-provisions-are-set-to-expire
My major worry about taxes is that unneeded complexity of our tax system could cause system failure. We can and must do better.
Toss the estate tax or just have it kick in at like a billion. It makes it enormously hard to pass a successful family business on which is why Berkshire Hathaway has had so many family businesses sell to it.
Yes, tax the working stiffs for everything they actually EARNED through HARD work.
But the lazy trustafarians, who get everything handed to them, who never worked a day in their life, who spend their time crying their eyes out that their yachts are 10′ shorter than they want —
Go ahead and shovel even more $$Billions into their pockets. Because why have a decent society when you can go back 800 years and have feudalism?
I agree with your concern but I have a cynical view of any effort to “simplify” the tax code. Every time this is done, many more pages are added to the tax code, and it becomes increasingly more complex.
One of my accounting professors jokingly referred to tax simplification efforts as the tax accountants relief act of year xxxx. There was a lot of truth in that.
This past tax filing I was looking for clarification in completing Form 1040, line 4a “IRA distribution” and 4b “Taxable amount”. Our IRA distribution consisted of non-taxed funds rolled over into our Thrift Savings Plan (similar to a 401k) for civil servants, proceeded by converting the non-deductible funds into our Roth accounts. I carefully read the instructions that address these two lines. The instructions were fairly clear, but I still wasn’t 100% sure on the interpretation of the “Exceptions”. So, I called the IRS before the end of the tax year, thinking they shouldn’t be overwhelmed by tax filers with questions. Well, getting to talk to an agent was quite a challenge between having to wait over 45 minutes just to get to the section that handles these types of questions to being hung up on as I was being transferred. This happened more than once. So, I decided to check with AI ChatGPT and received a coherent and straight forward explanation, which was how I had interpreted the rules. I still pursued having a discussion with an IRS agent and I finally got a hold of one. All they did was read the instructions back to me, really not much help. So, I asked the person if they were familiar with AI ChatGPT and they said no and didn’t have much interest in it. As I hung up the phone I thought, this person may be out of a job whenever the IRS employs AI. I used TurboTax to complete our tax return and it handled the required inputs and outputs and even typed “ROLLOVER” next to line 4b as mentioned in the 1040 instructions.